As Catalans Voted, ‘Dying With Fear’ at High School Turned Polling Place

BARCELONA, Spain — At some point on Sunday afternoon, as riot police officers forced their way into polling places all over the city, the Moisès Broggi high school in Barcelona became a fortress.

The volunteers overseeing the school’s defense ranged in age from 13 to 17, and represented a number of adolescent tribes, among them hippies, punks and a subset of girls with long, dark hair who called themselves “the smokers.”

The older boys wrapped their bicycle locks around the front gate, and braced it with a barricade of wooden benches. They assessed the front door: a narrow space, easy to defend. If the police forced their way in, they would find themselves in a sort of cage, surrounded on all sides.

Two hours and three minutes remained until the polls closed, at 8 p.m. Some 2,500 completed ballots were inside, in six sealed ballot boxes. Romain Flarion, 17, scanned the street for police convoys — vehicles with blacked-out windows had passed by slowly — and rolled a cigarette, looking a little sheepish.

“Inside, I’m dying with fear,” he said. “I think we all are.”

They had all expected confrontation on Sunday, but nothing like the violence that unfolded.

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A young couple in the courtyard of the Moisès Broggi school, a polling place for the independence referendum, which students helped to secure.CreditFelipe Dana/Associated Press

National forces in riot gear began charging into schools as soon as the polls opened, clearing crowds with truncheons and rubber bullets. At least 750 people were injured, Catalan officials said; Spain said dozens of its officers were hurt.

All day, at the Institut Moisès Broggi, an arts and technology magnet school, people watched video of raids carried out nearby, in which officers smashed through glass doors with axes and dragged women downstairs by the hair.

Aleix Clos Mari, a teacher who helped prepare the students for the vote, said the teenagers had volunteered to staff the polling center because their headmaster, like those across the region, had been threatened with criminal charges.

The students had expected to confront local Catalan officers, he said, not the Spanish riot police.

“They seem like medieval warriors — the helmet, the shield,” said Mr. Mari, 51, shaking his head. “It’s like hallucinating. We’re back to Chile, to Franco’s Spain.”

He looked out at his students, many of whom had spent the night in the gymnasium. They were jumpy, their eyes bloodshot.

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Students occupying the school in preparation for Catalonia’s independence referendum. They feared a police assault.CreditFelipe Dana/Associated Press

“They have grown up in two days,” he said.

A Spanish official announced that the referendum was“dismantled” as soon as the raids began, and in the course of the day security forces shut down around 92 polling stations. But many more remained open — Catalan officials said 2315 stations were ready for the vote — and within them, volunteers and organizers tried to protect the ballot boxes, sometimes using diversionary tactics.

At 5:57 a.m., an anonymous-looking young man in a black hooded sweatshirt slipped into the Moisès Broggi school building, and word got out that he had brought the ballot boxes, which had been hidden overnight. A cheer went up.

All day, there came warnings that the police were near, and a man carrying a baby became so panicked that he had to be helped out of the building. But the school stayed open, and by noon the line of voters wrapped around three sides of a city block, applauding people as they left.

Eduard Torrens, 40, an industrial engineer, furiously flipped through pictures of the damage left by police officers at his children’s school, where he had tried to vote in the morning.

“I thought they would not do it, but they have done it: They sent policemen to bash up schools and beat old people and children,” he said. “We tried to express ourselves peacefully, and they come in like a bunch of mercenaries, just like that.”

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The volunteers overseeing the school’s defense ranged in age from 13 to 17, and represented a number of adolescent tribes.CreditFelipe Dana/Associated Press

Voters were carried in with wheelchairs. Electronic voting platforms had been disabled by the government, and poll workers had to crosscheck voter identifications against census data using mobile phones, a painstaking process.

In the lobby, Dani Crespo, 15, waved his long arms, dividing the voters into two streams. There was talk of hiding the ballot boxes if the police came to take them. The thought nagged at Keila Gonzalez, 14, who wore a “Hannibal Corpse” T-shirt and a silver ring through her lip.

“It will be that moment when all that work we have done will be destroyed,” she said.

All anyone could think about was making it to 8 p.m., when the six sealed boxes could be removed from the building. The teenagers huddled for a briefing on nonviolent resistance from a bearded left-wing activist; two of them turned to each other and began kissing passionately.

Finally it was time to lock the doors. Outside, in a last effort to protect the ballot boxes from being seized, the crowd swelled to fill the street, and they chanted — “We have voted! We have voted!” — so that the block rang with the sound of it. An elfin, white-haired election observer, Josep Maria Vieta, slipped onto the school’s steps and whispered conspiratorially.

“I want to give you a scoop,” he said.“The boxes are already gone.”

At final count, the ballots totaled 2,858, of which 2,574 were to separate from Spain, he said.

“They flew away,” he said. “They disappeared. Someday, I will tell you how.”

Marta Arias contributed reporting from Barcelona.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Guarding Votes, Students Fortify A High School. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe